[Python-Dev] RFC: PEP 460: Add bytes % args and bytes.format(args) to Python 3.5

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2014 00:45:58 +1000
Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Right, but it seems to me that a new helper module that could be made
> backwards compatible at least as far as 2.6 (if not further) would be more
> useful for that than a builtin change that won't be available until 2015.

More useful in the short term, less useful in the long term.

> An encodedstr type wouldn't implicitly interoperate with the builtins
> (until we finally fix the sequence operand coercion bug in CPython) but
> could at least handle formatting operations like this.

That's a crude hack. Also it doesn't address the situation where you
want to interpolate bytestrings without them having any textual
significance.

Regards

Antoine.